Affecting accents and idioms not your own does not enable communication it’s pretentious at best. After all, knowing the words does not convey understanding. Spanish differentiates saber and conocer. The Japanese laugh at the presumption of gaijin to know what they’re talking about. In the case of Hillary it’s simple pandering.

JFK had his sibilance. LBJ had his drawl. Neither trawled black churches but both travelled where their intonations verged on incomprehensible. They didn’t affect anything else and LBJ’s standard reference for blacks is too close to the unprintable. I’m trying to imagine FDR or Eleanor speaking ebonics and can’t. Hillary has the nasal grate of her DuPage County upbringing. Plainly she’s trying to obscure her plain white bread background.

As for Ronnie with a beer? I’ld expect nothing less of an Irishman. Famously he bent elbows with Tip Oneill. Plainly Tip was more uncomfortable with the program. Sometimes these efforts at connecting with the common folk work and sometimes they don’t: Dukakis in a tank or Coolidge in head-dress, or Hillary at Yankees Stadium.

I can forgive the legend of Laker Showtime hoops immortality almost anything, but not this: Hillary Clinton’s campaign will announce any minute now that Magic Johnson will host a fundraiser for her at his house six days later on Sept…….

Your LA Times Blog link was mistakenly a repeat of the Newsday link.

Here’s the proper LA Times Blog link:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2007/08/hillary-tops-op.html

~Martin Luther King

Memo to the Democrats: You would be better served by treating the fact of skin color as irrelevent to any meaningful discussion except that of racism. As long as you grandstand on their genetic heritage as a way to aggrandize yourself by being in the midst of large numbers of minorities to be seen in their presence, as gross an act as collecting lawn jockeys and claiming you have diversity in your front yard, you only succeed in proving yourself to be manifestly racist by nature and clueless as to the fact that minorities are complete and total human beings regardless of their color. To lump their black and brown faces and stick yourself in their midst demonstrates that you not only do not respect them, but in all probabilty cannot even understand them.

However, I must take exception that you are choosing to attack a candidate’s style of delivery when addressing an audience in a religious setting in the Southern United States.

When an official is speaking to children for example, they will more than likely adapt their speech choice to relate with the audience.

There’s a difference between expected political pandering and condescension. (s)H(r)illary is an elitist in populist’s clothing. She does not affect her phony dialect merely because she is speaking to a black congregation in a southern church; she does so for any and all black audiences, in true liberal racist fashion.

On August 13th, 2007 at 8:57 am, terrig said:
Of course, you are welcome here and you berate us…

Terrig, nice to hear from you again. I responded to your post in the “House white flag” thread of July 12th, 2007… and never back from you after you made broad assumtions and about my comments on this site.

I hope you get the chance to read it.

I have not berated you or anyone else here. In fact, I have had pleasent conversation with many people on this site since my joining. I disagree with bear1909, jrlingreenbay and some others but have found a pleasent tone in which to have our conversations. I would appreciate the same with you.

Now to the issues:

I agree with you when you say this:

I would much rather hear what they have to say and not pander to the teamsters, the evangelicals, the you name it group.

It’s sad, but true, some members of the general public feel that the President should be a person that they relate to. So in order to play to that effect, the public official will sometimes find ways to connect to the audience.

I referenced President Reagan in an attempt to show one public official who took the “Office of the President” and wanted to show that he was (still) one of them.

I find it interesting that my comments about the request of a video from presidential candidates campaigning in rural America have been hardly noticed or responded to.

Anyway, in my above post, I said nothing about her ideas. If you (or anyone) don’t like her ideas, fine. If you (or anyone) like her ideas, great. But let’s stick to just that… her ideas.

Let’s let get caught up in issues so much (like what kind of clothes she wears for example) that start to take away from the issues at hand.

That was my point.

Why couldn’t they just be ‘celebrities’? Was the race, ethnicity, or religion of the hosts mentioned when the candidates went to Geffen’s home?

Wow, YGBSM.

Why couldn’t they just be ‘celebrities’? Was the race, ethnicity, or religion of the hosts mentioned when the candidates went to Geffen’s home?

On August 13th, 2007 at 7:31 am, sausage said:
DarkKnight: Nice points.

I do think it’s amusing how people expect politicians to be anything BUT experts at pandering to the crowd they are speaking to

I think it’s amusing you ventured out from under the bridge.

Good call Aguado.